No good.
Too far.
Which sucks badly. How this gets sorted out in the future in such circumstances is a difficult one.
No money may well come down to how much you personally might be prepared to pay for even one charger.
This is an interesting one. I have felt for a while that there is a market for this. At least some EVs can deliver power from their DC charging connection. You can’t just jumper between the DC sockets of two cars. Not without almost certain large scale bad things happening. But a charge controller that manages a connection would seem feasible. It won’t be cheap. But as a device that enabled a business to rescue dead flat EVs, maybe.
Alternatively, a high power inverter that can suck on the DC socket and deliver AC power to the AC charge socket. Not clear it would be cheaper but maybe safer. At a lower capacity, Enphase have announced an EV battery to load capable EV charger. They claim release is sometime this year. It just uses the same microinverters that they use to convert solar panel DC to AC, which makes sense. So, there is an exemplar of the idea. No information on power delivery.
If you flatten the battery of an EV in your car park, Just get a very long extension lead and charge it from a power outlet. It will be painful, but you only need to get enough charge to revive the car and drive to a real charging station.
As a last gasp - portable ICE powered generator.
Call AAA. They can get you going.
The Supercharger network is arguably one of the biggest real assets owned by Tesla. It keeps Tesla owners locked into a technofiscal ‘ecosystem’ similar to how Apple’s intertwined MacOS devices encourage brand loyalty, and unlike many third party charging stations which are franchise, and with Ford and GM (and possibly other automakers) adopting the proprietary Tesla charging port to enable higher speed charging, it could potentially be worth more than the actual profits from EV manufacture (and is, practically speaking, the only way Tesla could even hope to realize enough revenue to justify their still ridiculously exaggerated market valuation).
It seems like someone sat down, chunked up the numbers, and decided that since the ‘development’ on Supercharger is ‘done’, the development team is no longer needed, at least in the near term, and the assumption is probably that when they need more engineering they’ll rent it from a body shop or reconstitute it out of people with relevant skills regardless of whether they have any pertinent knowledge or specific experience. Or maybe they are going all in on training chatbots to be engineers and platform developers. It seems incredibly short-sighted.
Stranger
The people I know with them don’t use them for road trips. Sometimes there are two cars in the house - one either a hybrid or gas car for road trips, plus the EV which is used for commuting and running around town. Or, in the case of one of my friends who is single, when she wants to take a road trip, she rents a gas car.
Yeah, it wouldn’t be my choice for a road trip. We get in the car and drive, stopping only for gas, potty breaks and the drive through. Five minutes maybe four or five times a day. At least twelve hours in a day - up to sixteen. I’ll “refresh” by getting to my destination earlier - maybe with one or two days on the road rather than two or three - where I can nap, shower, stretch out, and relax - rather than wandering around a gas station/grocery store.
We just took a road trip precisely because we wanted to experience it with our Tesla Model X. We’re older now, and usually in no rush. It was a very easy and enjoyable week. No anxiety related to charging whatsoever. Usually we charged and had a meal. Sometimes, just 15 minutes to check emails and stand up for a minute. (It doesn’t hurt that we were one of the last to get “free supercharging for life” with our purchase)
ETA: Two hotels that didn’t even advertise charging offered to plug us in overnight (no charge) so we left with a full tank in the morning.
Yeah, I don’t enjoy the road trip part of the road trip enough to want to do anything but have it OVER. And my friends with EVs are generally road tripping with a purpose (getting a kid two states over and back during college, in the Midwest, where two states over is a day drive, for instance). Those aren’t trips you necessarily want to draw out.
Understood. We’re fortunate that we don’t have to take trips like that anymore. This last trip is the first time in at least 15 years I’ve taken a car more than 200 miles from home. I was missing the experience, so decided to do it just for fun (and visit some kids on other states). If we didn’t’ have an EV, we would have just flown down to see them.
Charging might add an hour or two to a trip, not days.
The biggest delay comes when charging requires a route change that takes considerably longer. That will only be a problem if you’re venturing off interstates or other common paths.
An extension cord? You said that it is too far away, but you should be able to run 100 feet or more and still charge at 5 amps, or something really slow. You don’t have to fill the battery, just put enough in to move it to a proper charger.
I’ve seen pictures of trucks with large batteries that can give EVs a boost. Like imagine AAA bringing you a gallon of gas. I’m sure these are rare and expensive. Probably cheaper and easier to just get the car towed to a charger.
Also, if the battery just “goes flat,” then there is probably something wrong with it, and you need to tow it to a service center. The battery should not do that. You can drive until the car refuses to go any further, but just like running out of gas, I’m going to do some driver blaming if that’s the case.
The two realistic scenarios I can see:
- You had very little charge left, and were planning to fill up the next day, but a cold front came through that night, and the battery that was at 15% is now effectively at 5% (until it warms up), and doesn’t have enough juice to get to the preferred charger. Solution is to drive the car to a closer (possibly slower) charger, until it warms up enough or gets enough charge to make it to the preferred charger. Or move it near an accessible electrical outlet, and use level 1 charging to get it boosted and warm.
- The car was parked with under 5% charge, and then left to sit for months, and it lost the remaining charge, so now it can’t move. Yeah, don’t do that. Like with all things, you can stupid yourself into problems.
It’s easy to imagine scenarios where gas cars are a problem. “Someone siphoned all of the gas out of my car, and now I have to walk two miles to the gas station, but I have plenty of electricity here!” “It was on E, and I parked at the Starbucks, but now I can’t get it started again. They have chargers, but no gas pumps!”
My car won’t charge if I use more than one extension cord.
But I agree with your other point, if you have enough charge to get home, you’ll have basically whatever is left the next morning. There should be no surprises unless there’s a bigger problem with the car.
Depends on the length of the trip, doesn’t it? If you are breaking a 22 hour trip (straight through) into two days, adding twenty minutes of charge time every 150 miles adds three hours to the trip. That turns two eleven hour car days (long but doable) into two twelve and a half hour car days - which I’m less likely to do. So that’s three days, and two hotel nights. Also, you are road tripping through the Midwest, which has great swaths of inadequate charging infrastructure, so you might not be optimizing your stops for time. And that assumes you get 150 miles out of a charge - which neither my friends’ little non-Teslas ever got, and in winter, range decreases.
(Our regular college road trip was Minneapolis to Boston. Its about twenty hours in theory - less if you drive like a madwoman through Ohio and Indiana. More if you run into traffic in Chicago or weather or decide that you really need to stop and eat something that didn’t come out of a drive through window. I could do it in two days in a gas car. It would be a stretch to do it in two in an EV because its two long days.).
BTW, my next car will likely be an EV, but my youngest is done with college, and road trips now are four hours to the North Shore.
Add us to the list. That is exactly our arrangement. EV for errands and commute, Hybrid for road trips.
Teslas get close to 300 in ideal conditions. Less of course in cold weather and lead foot driving. They easily get in excess of 250.
Just a ballpark figure.
I’m driving my car around town doing some errands. I’d like to charge up my car while I’m in town. Should I:
a) Pull in to a charging station and charge it up for a couple of minutes while I wait, like I’d do at a gas station.
b) Plug it in at a grocery store and leave it charging for the twenty or thirty minutes I’m in the store.
c) Wait until I get back home because it needs to be plugged in for an hour or more to charge up.
Unless you have free charging, charging at home will always be the least expensive option as well as being the most convenient.
That strikes me as being like a restaurant only having one item on its menu and trying to convince me this is an “advantage” for me because I won’t have to make a decision about what I want to eat.
If I want to take a long drive with a twenty minute break every two hours, I can do that in a gas powered car. Or I can drive for eight straight hours.
Having to stop every two hours for a twenty minute break because that’s the limitation of the car is not an advantage.
Road tripping an EV is different than a gas car. Gas car you drive until empty (or the screams from the people who need to pee get too annoying), and then fill up. EV you go to the next charger, and then charge just enough to make it to the next charger. If chargers are dense you might be skipping locations.
Maximum range often isn’t that important. You just need enough range. So yeah, 1.5-2.5 hours (150ish miles), and then a 5-20 minute stop.
The way I think about it is I’m only “wasting” time charging if the people are all waiting for the car to finish. Often the car is done before the people, but frequently we’re all back to the car and ready with 5 minutes of charging left. So that stop we wasted 5 minutes compared to a gas car.
For day trips, like up to the mountains to ski, EV is no different than ICE. I’m full before I leave, and then fillup again when I get home. Only difference is it costs me $5 instead of $28.
I’m stopping every two hours for bladder related reasons anyway. Not the car’s choice.
I’m guessing you don’t think “I’m lucky to have a bladder that lets me break up long drives.”
As usual, things are more complicated but simple.
If you are near an outlet, as mentioned, plug in a simple charger (like the portable one that’s available for a Tesla). Otherwise, you need to tow, The 110V plug adds about 3mi/hr. How far to the nearest higher-level charger? Check supercharge.info or plugshare.com…
Theoretically, a tow truck could arrive with a generator or battery pack capable of a half hour or so of 110V 1000A, toaster-level output. Highly unlikely.
If they tow you to a nearby outlet you can still charge. slow; better to tow you to a full power charger (L2 or L3). Teslas have a 12V battery to run the electronics, accessories, and such - it is charged from the big battery just like your alternator charges your gas car’s battery. However newer Teslas have a smaller lithium brick, whereas my 2018 model 3 has a full-sized regular lead-acid car battery (needed to replace it about a year ago - it gives you a few days’ warning). The brick discharges much faster than a regular battery, since it’s not meant to do heavy duty work like crank an engine.
If you have 12V when you get to the charger, no problem. Plug in and charge. And never get to that point again - bad boy!!
So if you run your big battery down to zero, then the clock is ticking on the 12V. When that runs down to zero, you got problems. First, I hope you left the door open or window down. Silly, but like many car doors, there is no top frame, the window goes into a slot on the trim - so without power, you will have to bend the trim to open the door, even from the inside. Similarly, unlocking is by keycard or phone, so that won’t work without 12V. (or, leave the trunk open and the seat down.) At least you can pry open the chargeport door.
So you get to the charger with access to the interior, but no 12v. You have to crawl into the trunk through the back seat if it’s not open to pull on a ribbon, move the catch to allow the charger plug to seat all the way. Then, you need 12V to charge.
Remove the cover plate for the front towhook (little round cover) and hook 12V (polarity matters!) to the wires in there. That pops the frunk. Inside, remove the trim near the windshield - it snaps out - and you see the battery, ready to be jumpered just like a regular gas car. (Again, polarity VERY important). I’ve seen suggestions even a simple 9V battery is enough to open the frunk, but you definitely need a regular jumper for the rest.
Wait for the computer to boot up, then it will allow you to start the charge process. Once you have a few miles of charge, you sjould be able to disconnect the jumpers.
If you are totally locked out of the car, just do the frunk trick, jumper the battery, and wait a minute or five for the computer to boot, then you can unlock the car, open doors and trunk, plug in the charger, etc. and start charging like usual.
The moral of the story, like with a gas car, is DO NOT GO TO ZERO.
Another important point I belive I mentioned earlier - batteries (all rehargeables) need to be above freezing to charge. Running down to zero in very cold weather will mean a much longer wait (I think(?) the charger will instead heat the battery) or a tow to a warm garage. Not sure what the impliction is for the 12V brick if it gets too cold?
“running on fumes” is a lot more hassle than with a gas car. You should avoid going down below 10%.